Water parks aim to saturate market

Cement ponds are out. Today's swimmer prefers a steep slide to a laid-back back float, and amusement parks and park districts are competing to please.

April 18, 2005|By Trine Tsouderos, Tribune staff reporter.

Six Flags' new 15-acre water park in Gurnee boasts 25 slides, a river churning with waterfalls, a 500,000-gallon wave pool, a tiki bar and one thing sure to warm the oft-chilled hearts of Midwesterners in summer--heated water.

And that's just one weapon deployed by amusement parks, commercial resorts and even local park districts in their increasingly competitive bids to persuade children--and their parents--to slip, slide and surf in the multimillion-dollar aquatic playgrounds.

Call it the water-park wars.

Long gone are the days of the rectangular cement municipal pool with its accompanying tot pond. From Bloomingdale to Gurnee to Elk Grove Village, communities and companies are responding to the mania for water parks by installing sky-high water slides, slow-moving rivers for inner tubing and gonzo playgrounds that shoot, dump and spray cataracts of water. Chicago alone has more than 30 water parks, many built by the Park District in the last five years.

Unable to compete, many communities with old-style pools have suffered a drop-off in attendance, officials said.

"Thrills are in," said Steve Scholten, executive director of the Bloomingdale Park District, which is replacing its municipal pool with The Oasis, a $4.3 million water park featuring, among other things, two water slides and an aquatic playground. "We wanted to make some summer memories."

In Gurnee, residents soon could have three water parks to choose from: the community's own 3-year-old, $6 million Hunt Club Aquatic Center; Six Flags Hurricane Harbor, scheduled to open Memorial Day weekend; and a large, indoor Wisconsin Dells-style water park still in the planning stages.

"We're the water-park mecca of the Midwest," joked Charles Balling, director of the Gurnee Park District.

With so many water parks being planned or built, some wonder about the danger of saturating the market in slides and zero-depth pools as communities and private parks compete for the same swimsuit-clad customers.

But industry analysts point to the real water-park mecca of the Midwest--and the U.S.--as evidence that you can never have too many water parks. The Wisconsin Dells, which launched the indoor water-park resort craze in the mid-1990s, has about 20 hotel water parks.

"People ask whether there are too many built in the Dells," said Jeff Coy, a Rochester, Minn.-based analyst who tracks indoor hotel water parks for Hotel Waterpark Resort Research & Consulting. "We say, you are asking the wrong question."

A better one he said is: "If you own a hotel in the Dells and you don't have an indoor water park, how much longer will you survive?"

A hot trend

The fact is, water parks, especially those Dells-style resort parks as well as the city-owned variety, are hot right now, said experts, who put the number of parks at about 1,000 nationwide.

Between 2000 and 2004, the number of hotels with indoor water parks quadrupled to more than 75 from 18, according to a Hotel Waterpark Resort Research report. Dozens more are in the midst of being built or planned, the report says.

"The trend is water park and water thrills," said Michelle Hoffman, spokeswoman for Six Flags Great America, which is counting on Hurricane Harbor to energize attendance at its Gurnee amusement park.

The Caribbean-themed water park is "going to drive significant growth there, which is just growth to recapture where that park was for several years throughout the '90s," said Six Flags Chief Executive Officer Kieran Burke in a November conference call with investors. "I feel good about that market."

The logic behind all this slide-building is that families love water parks, said Gina Kellogg, spokeswoman for the World Waterpark Association, a non-profit industry trade group based in Overland Park, Kan.

Young children flock to the watery playgrounds, older children dig the mile-high waterslides, and parents enjoy floating on a river in inner tubes, Kellogg said.

"It is one area of recreation that a family can do all together," she said.

And once families start visiting water parks, they begin expecting more from their local pool than just a dip or dive in a boring expanse of water, experts said. People want chutes and slides and, more recently, "watercoasters" and continuous wave pools for boogie-boarding.

"Cities are seeing a falling-off of attendance at the regular flat-water municipal pools because they just didn't hold the same appeal that a water park does," Kellogg said.

Aging pools replaced

In Bloomingdale, attendance at the city's 31-year-old pool dropped about 30 percent over the last seven years, Scholten said. Each year, fewer pool passes were sold and fewer people were buying day passes, he said.

"Attendance was down, and the pool was falling apart," he said. The Oasis, which opens in June, "will be a significant shot given to our attendance this year."